At the time of this post there are about 60000/50MB unconfirmed transactions, total fees are about 100 BTC/24h. Meanwhile average Segwit support per last 144 blocks is around 20%.
We've heard arguments from both sides. Isn't it time now to listen to each other, understand and come to a compromise?
All of us want the same: growth of Bitcoin adoption.
Core team, your opinion, decisions have the heaviest weight. You are the smartest among opposing groups (I indeed think so). But don't you think that if you concede that Bitcoin needs bigger blocks, and that at least one hardfork is inevitable, it will lead to reconciliation and perhaps even acceptance of segwit as a softfork, do you?
Bigger blocks group, it's in your power to block segwit. But don't you think that if you indeed do so, you will strangle Bitcoin and all your investments in mining hardware and in Bitcoin will become worthless?
Currently segwit is the shortest path to increasing Bitcoin throughput. A hardfork needs to be well thought over and announced several months before taking effect. Let's be honest, it won't happen sooner than a year from now.
IMO:
1) There is no way of scaling Bitcoin short term except adopting segwit. Contentious hardfork isn't an option it would be disastrous.
2) Whether or not Segwit will be adopted in it's current form, Bitcoin needs bigger blocks. If we aim at going mainstream, 1MB isn't enough in spite of Segwit, LN, whatever. I beleive even 8MB would still be handleable for Bitcoin enthusiasts running full nodes, not to mention bigger entities such mining pools. I however hope that a solution for dynamic blocksize will be found, which will satisfy all parties.
3) Average total fees per block must remain much lower than block subsidy for more than a decade from now, because of mining energy consumption:
However, we can estimate Bitcoin mining power consumption in 12 years, provided that Bitcoin replaced all M1 money supply in the world, what is very unrealistic, but we want to make a conservative estimate. As of 2009 M1 was about 20*10
12USD
http://dont-tread-on.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SmallGlobalMoneySupply.pngIn 12 years block reward will be 8 times less than now, let's assume that fees still constitute a minor part of block reward, i.e. block reward is 3.125 BTC, that means 18.75 BTC created per hour. Value of 1 BTC equals roughly 1 million USD of 2009 purchasing power (in 2027 USD doesn't exist already, since BTC completely replaced it). Let's now assume, that miners spend half of their revenue to pay for electricity (that's rather unrealistic, but we want to make a conservative estimation), so we have 9.4*10
6 USD per hour to pay for electricity. If we take a reasonable price of 0.07 USD/kWt*h, that results in 1.3*10
11 Watts of total power consumption by all miners in the world. In 2007 the world produced about 20*10
15 Wt*h of electric power, or 2.3*10
12 Watts on the average. We can see that under such unrealistic conditions bitcoin mining consumes less than 6% of total world electric power.
Hope I didn't make a mistake in calculations.
BTW, we can conclude that even in 12 years Bitcoin is unlikely to replace all money in the world, since 6% of total electric power produced in the world is a bit much, I'd say that bitcoin will need not less than 16 years to achieve that
And again, all of us want the same: Bitcoin adoption growth.
